I found this netbook(?) somewhere in old things and just wonder: can linux be installed on it?
No, you’re not allowed. Now go to your room and think about what you’ve done.
*what you have NOT done.
Fixed that for you 😉
Surely its easier to install Linux than android.
I want to know how they put android on it
I mean, the internals might just be the ones of a tablet or something. With android I’d be guessing its an ARM chip
Wut. This thing is like a decade old at least. Did we use ARM back then?
ARM chips were common in phones, even 10 years ago. But after doing a bit of research, there seems to be an unofficial open source version of android made to run on x86. Might be that this thing is running that. No idea, really
Probably Yes
Looks like you already did
deleted by creator
Most likely yes, as many others have said. Of course you’ll likely have to pick a very lightweight DE.
As a fallback there is always NetBSD.
NetBSD will not work at all with Broadcom Wireless
I mean if you’re down to NetBSD as your pick you’ve probably already made some big concessions so plugging into Ethernet isn’t a huge leap at that point.
Broadcom makes the wifi
Yes you can here is a place to start https://kernelhacks.blogspot.com/2012/06/arch-linux-on-wm8650-netbook.html?m=1
This looks like one of those low cost netbooks from the time where “EPad” and “MID” tablets were a thing. There is an edition of Windows CE floating around for these - but WiFi will not work, neither the modem if this has one built in.
No idea about Linux - there is a kernel so you’re technically half way there, but considering most of these had a slow single core ARM CPU and 256MB of RAM on a good day, practical use is limited IMO
It probably has USB, wifi adapters are cheap.
Well of course you can.
Yes you can, it won’t be great though.
I used to maintain a Linux distribution called “OpenWM8650” (back in 2011 / 2012) which was specially aimed at the WM8650 and WM8505. It would run off the SD card. Which wasn’t great, but the flash onboard support was horrible at best.
Maybe you can find some old information on it, on XDA because the website for the initial distribution is long gone.
https://archive.org/details/wm8650-linux It might have been archived here.
This device should be able to run Linux fine of the specs you provided are correct. You can either use CLI or a Light weight Window manager like IceWM. Web browsing and video playback are out of the question but it most certainly can run vim.
I would just install Debian. It is likely a 32bit machine.
I think you would need to provide more detail to know what you have. Does it have a model number on it anywhere?
that’s it: CPU: WM8650 800Hz Memory:DDR 256MB
It’s information on back cover
“WM8650” seems to indicate a VIA WonderMedia WM8650 armv5te chipset, used by a lot of anemic Android laptops circa 2011 (sold under various brandnames, but apparently all made in the same factory). People have installed Linux on them in the past (there seems to have been a fad for Arch on these for a while, given the search results), but you might have trouble getting a device tree that will work with a modern kernel.
Honestly, though, it has less processor than a Raspberry Pi 3. Unless you’ve already thought of a specific use for this, I’d dump it back in the junk drawer.
I played with Raspbian Minecraft up to Raspi 2.
I think my pi zero w might run a circle around it.
It might be an interesting project to hardware mod it to gut it and replace internally with an R.Pi.
Probably not worth trying to actually use today. I’d leave it as it is, imo it’s better as a small piece of history - Android on PC is pretty niche
I just can’t find
Just want to say good luck. Someone brought me one of these and asked to make it ready to be their university laptop in 2013. I worked real hard not to laugh because money was obviously tight but I just told them to return the pos to Amazon.
The first image for wm8650 that comes up is a Debian boot logo.
